Current Events > Billionaires lobbied AGAINST UBI experiements - don't want you having UBI

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As a well-known quote often wrongly attributed to Mahatma Ghandi says, First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. As of 2024, the basic income movement in the United States is now firmly in the "then they fight you" stage thanks to a slew of bills introduced in state after state that are all attempting to ban the basic income experiments that have spread across the country. Over 150 guaranteed basic income pilots are now ongoing or recently completed in 24 states as of this writing, and so far, bills in seven states have been introduced to stop them. All of the bills are the result of efforts by the Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA) - a lobbying group with a billionaire-fueled junk science record every American should know about.
First, to bring every reader up to speed, basic income (or UBI) is "a periodic cash payment, unconditionally delivered to all on an individual basis, without means test or work requirement." Although such payments without conditions already exist upon a mountain of evidence, post-2020, experiments have exploded in cities across the U.S. thanks to the efforts of Mayors for Guaranteed Income (MGI) which was founded in 2020 by former Mayor Michael Tubbs after the success of the pilot in Stockton, CA that provided $500 a month to 125 people for 2 years. The biggest findings there were that full-time employment grew at twice the rate of the control group, and mental health improved significantly. Yes, despite the common fear that people provided basic income would work less, in Stockton, they worked more, and the mental health impact was comparable to medication.
Since the Stockton pilot ended, there have been dozens of other completed pilots with completed reports, all of which report the same general findings over and over again. Employment does not go down to any worrisome degree, and often actually goes up, with people finding better jobs and better pay, and where wage work is reduced, people invest in schooling or pursue unpaid work or self-employment. With each experiment's results, the case for UBI becomes stronger, and it's clear that some very wealthy people don't like those results.
In March of 2021 and again in late 2022, Texas became the first state to attempt to stop more results. House Bill 4550 in 2021 and then House Bill 553 in 2022 both included the following wording:

Both bills died in committee. In January 2024, a different approach was taken, with a request for the Texas attorney general to declare such pilots as unconstitutional. It should be noted that as of Feb 2024, there have been seven basic income pilots launched in Texas. One of those that took place in Austin has already published its results. It found that a payment of $1,000 a month to 135 people for one year led to 9% of participants working less and 7% working more, and of those who worked less, half upskilled for better future jobs, and half chose unpaid care work. Housing security also significantly increased, as did food security, participants lived in better housing and ate more balanced meals, and they also felt significantly more connected to the people and places in their neighborhoods. A ban would have prevented these findings.
In April of 2023, Wisconsin became the next state to attempt to stop more results. At the time, there was a pilot in the city of Madison that wasn't quite done yet, where 155 parents of kids under age 18 got $500 a month for one year. The bill would not have stopped that pilot because it was privately-funded, but the bill was written to stop any future pilots from using any state funds to test "regular periodic cash payments that are unearned and that may be used for any purpose." The bill passed the Wisconsin House and Senate and died by veto by Governor Evers.
In 2024, the anti-UBI bill floodgates opened, starting with Iowa in January and followed in quick succession by West Virginia, South Dakota, Arizona and Arkansas in February. All of them introduced bills of their own to stop basic income pilots, all with similar language. At this point, it became clear that a lobbying organization of some kind was behind the bills, something like the American Legislative Exchange Council that writes bills for legislators to put their names on and pass into law. In my research to discover the group responsible, I found it's the Foundation for Government Accountability, which led down a rabbit hole of dark money and a slew of harmful bills desired by the 1% to reduce their taxes and reduce the power of the 99% to stand in their way.
Who is the FGA?
The Foundation for Government Accountability was founded in Florida in 2011 by Tarren Bragdon after cutting his chops in Maine at the Maine Heritage Policy Center and then as adviser to Maine's governor, LePage. It was in Maine where Bragdon and a cohort of fellow young conservatives gained a reputation for outrageous anti-welfare policies. I remember them as a pack of inexperienced, activist right-wingers that went crazy on welfare reform, said Cynthia Dill, a former state senator to the Washington Post in 2018. It galled me that they had no expertise whatsoever in health and human services but were appointed to places of power by the LePage administration.
Bragdon's regressive work in Maine was only the beginning for him. He went on to export that work to every state he could and even the federal government too, starting in 2017 when the FGA attempted to expand the work requirements for SNAP to even include parents and limit waivers for states regardless of unemployment rates. The FGA reports now having relationships with 450 policymakers across the country. Bragdon has described FGA's goal as wanting to "return America to a country where entrepreneurship thrives, personal responsibility is rewarded, and paychecks replace welfare checks," and that their approach is "to really tackle one big issue: how to give more Americans the life-changing power of work, at both the state and federal level.
At this point, I will remind readers that universal basic income is quite different than welfare in how it doesn't get pulled away with work, which is why so many UBI pilots show increased employment for recipients since all wages from work increase their total income, whereas with conditional welfare they can be left barely better off financially, or even worse off. Means-tested welfare creates cliff effects, and cliff effects disincentivize work. I will also mention that if someone's goal is thriving entrepreneurship, it should be considered very intriguing how often UBI pilots show large increases in entrepreneurship. That is, it should be interesting to those who truly value empirical evidence.

The FGA however is clearly not interested in empirical evidence. One of its first "studies" contributed to Florida Governor Rick Scott's defense of his controversial welfare drug-testing law, requiring benefit recipients to take a drug test as a qualification for benefits. A Bush-appointed federal judge threw out that study as evidence, claiming it was "not competent expert opinion" and that "even a cursory review of certain assumptions in the pamphlet undermines its conclusions."
Florida's law requiring drug tests for welfare applicants ended up identifying only 2.6% testing positive, significantly lower than the general population's rate of 8.13% in Florida. This directly contradicted justifications for the law, which also proved financially wasteful. Florida spent over $118,000 reimbursing those who tested negative, exceeding any program savings and resulting in a net cost exceeding $45,000. It cost more to apply the condition than it saved. It should also be noted that studies of unconditional cash programs tend to show a net reduction in drug use.
In 2016, the FGA touted a study from Kansas of work requirements on SNAP which was panned by both liberal and conservative economists alike for cherry-picking data. Work requirements should be based on credible evidence and attention to policy details the exact opposite of what FGA produces, tweeted Peter Germanis, a conservative economist who served in the Reagan and Bush administrations who went on to tweet, Tarren Bragdon bases his arguments to support work requirements on the junk science produced by the FGA no serious researcher would accept their claims."

All the reports of the newer basic income pilots that have been published since that review have only further strengthened the review's conclusion. Over and over again, in city after city, work has either increased or not significantly decreased.
The FGA anti-UBI paper also compares the boosted unemployment insurance payments during the pandemic to UBI, which anyone who understands UBI knows is quite different. Paying people on the condition they remain unemployed is not at all the same thing as paying people regardless of their employment status. One creates a work disincentive and the other doesn't. It is this difference that all the latest generation of pilots are testing. What happens when someone gets to keep a payment in addition to their paycheck, instead of losing it? The basic income pilots are answering that question using the scientific method to compare treatment groups to control groups.
A week after FGA published its anti-UBI paper, it planted an op-ed in the Dallas Morning News, just as it and similar groups often do as part of their overall strategy. The op-ed made no mention of the positive results of the pilot in Texas that had just been published a month prior. Instead it made claims based on the pilots from the 1970s, which were quite different in design, and although do have something to tell us about basic income, need to be looked at in their full context, like for example the high marginal tax rates above and beyond 50% that they tested, and the fact that self-reporting working less meant a larger payment.
From now going forward, if you make a point of looking, you'll find quotes from the FGA in articles about bills to ban basic income pilots at the state level. What you won't find is any mention of Alaska's UBI which it has had since 1982. You won't find any mention of how studies have shown it has increased employment there, or how it has improved the health of mothers and babies, or how it has reduced obesity and child abuse. And most importantly of all, something else you won't find in FGA's anti-UBI hit pieces, is the names of FGA's funders.

Who is Funding the FGA?
According to the Center for Media and Democracy's SourceWatch, the largest single donor to FGA has been the Ed Uihlein Family Foundation, with a total contribution from 2014-2021 of $17.85 million. Both in their 70s, the Uihleins (pronounced YOU-line) are a husband and wife team, Richard and Liz, worth around $5 billion. Together, the couple is the fourth biggest donor to political campaigns in the U.S., having reported giving over $190 million. The New York Times described them in 2018 as the most powerful couple you've never heard of. In 2023 as reported by The Guardian, the Uihleins were "one of the key funders of election denial," having poured "tens of millions into the 'Restoration of America' network that promotes ludicrous election conspiracy theories," and "in the 2022 cycle, were also top donors to election-denying candidates." The Uihleins were also one of the biggest contributors to the "March To Save America" rally that preceded the violent insurrection on January 6.
The second biggest donor to the FGA is Donors Trust and its affiliate organization Donors Capital Fund, with a total contribution of $17.2 million from 2014 to 2022. Founded by a pair of activist libertarians, the combo are two of the most influential conservative organizations around. In 2013, Mother Jones dubbed them the dark-money ATM of the right. Donors Trust allows wealthy contributors who want to donate millions to do so anonymously, essentially scrubbing the identity of those underwriting organizations like the FGA. If you're a rich person who doesn't like the idea of UBI and how it will likely raise your taxes, you can give to Donors Trust and let them give the FGA your money for you, protecting your identity from those who would like to know you're fighting against boosting their incomes with a basic income floor.

also this same group has lobbied for states to make bills making it easier to hire minors in the workplace across states

That's wicked. I don't see how UBI stops them from being billionaires though. Wouldn't that money just mean we have more disposable income to spend on their companies?

The billionaires are also stupid enough to not realize that if we don't get UBI, American capitalism will completely collapse soon as a result of them hoarding all the money, and all their riches and assets will rapidly become worthless in the sociopolitical catastrophe that will follow.

That's wicked. I don't see how UBI stops them from being billionaires though. Wouldn't that money just mean we have more disposable income to spend on their companies?

That's wicked. I don't see how UBI stops them from being billionaires though. Wouldn't that money just mean we have more disposable income to spend on their companies?

Look what happened because we got covid checks and that wasn't even much money they just turned it around and blamed inflation on the covid checks. Do you think if we got UBI it would be anything but another way to funnel more money up to the billionaires. It doesn't matter how much money we have when we don't control the prices of the stuff we need to survive.

So you want status quo?
But point if thread is showing the funding lobbying to prevent UBI

So you want status quo?
But point if thread is showing the funding lobbying to prevent UBI

If UBI raises everyone's wealth by 1% (just using an arbitrary number for conversation), all prices of retail items will reflect that, and will it really provide any relief?

"We shouldn't give people more money because it will make things more expensive" is a really dumb argument to make in a world where things are still getting more expensive despite people not having more money.

It's like saying "Why put a bandage on my cut? It's still going to bleed anyway!"

And no, you can't blame the COVID relief anymore. Those checks stopped being issued over two years ago, and prices are still continuing to climb. The problem was never the pandemic money, it's just a scapegoat.